France calls for humanitarian corridors to open, air strikes to end

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region (Kurdistan 24) – France repeated calls for air strikes in Syria to end and for humanitarian corridors to open as civilians continue to be affected by the ongoing conflict, a French official said on Friday.

“We are very preoccupied and are monitoring the situation on the ground very carefully. The air strikes need to end,” Florence Parly said on France Inter radio.

“Civilians are the targets, in Idlib and in the east of Damascus. This fighting is absolutely unacceptable,” Parly added.

The civil war in Syria is now in its eighth year, killing hundreds of thousands of people, and displacing more than 11 million others as regional and global powers also operate in the country, either in the fight against the Islamic State (IS) or to support the regime in Damascus.

On Thursday, the internal conflict took a new turn as the US-led coalition confirmed it and its allies on the ground in Syria shelled pro-government troops with heavy air and artillery fire to repel “an unprovoked attack” near the Euphrates.

The incident might result in further conflict in the region in Syria’s oil-rich east where the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), an alliance of Kurdish and Arab fighters, control large swaths of territory in northern of the country after driven out IS from the area.

Meanwhile, Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Turkish counterpart, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, seem to have come to a tentative agreement to host another summit, along with Iran, to discuss the ongoing situation in war-torn Syria.

Several rounds of UN-sponsored conferences and the involvement of multiple ground forces in Syria have been unable to put an end to the protracted war.